Automating Response Evaluation for Franchising Questions on the 2017 Economic Census, , , , ,This chapter is a preliminary draft unless otherwise noted. It may not have been subjected to the formal review process of the NBER. This page will be updated as the chapter is revised.
Chapter in forthcoming NBER book Big Data for Twenty-First Century Economic Statistics, Katharine G. Abraham, Ron S. Jarmin, Brian Moyer, and Matthew D. Shapiro, editors Between the 2007 and 2012 Economic Censuses (EC), the count of franchise-affiliated establishments declined by 9.8%. One reason for this decline was a reduction in resources that the Census Bureau was able to dedicate to the manual evaluation of survey responses in the franchise section of the EC. Extensive manual evaluation in 2007 resulted in many establishments, whose survey forms indicated they were not franchise-affiliated, being recoded as franchise-affiliated. No such evaluation could be undertaken in 2012. In this paper, we examine the potential of using external data harvested from the web in combination with machine learning methods to mostly automate the process of evaluating responses to the franchise section of the 2017 EC. Our method allows us to quickly and accurately identify and recode establishments have been mistakenly classified as not being franchise-affiliated, increasing the unweighted number of franchise-affiliated establishments in the 2017 EC by 22 percent to 42 percent. This paper is available as PDF (226 K) or via email
Acknowledgments and Disclosures Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX This chapter first appeared as NBER working paper w25818, Automating Response Evaluation for Franchising Questions on the 2017 Economic Census, Joseph Staudt, Yifang Wei, Lisa Singh, Shawn D. Klimek, J. Bradford Jensen, Andrew L. Baer |
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